Thursday, April 27, 2017

Some Quick Delphi Opinions

A few quick bits of opinion, and a question for my readers:

1. Be it resolved that third party tool companies that offer fantastic support are an essential part of any small shop (that uses Delphi or otherwise). Be it resolved that RemObjects is about as awesome in the support department as it gets. I've been a fan of DataAbstract and the RemObjects remoting SDK, for Delphi and for .NET, for a long time. Recently I was trying to upgrade an old project to use the latest version of RemObjects DataAbstract. The "remobjects connect" site where you get support is fantastic. Unlike a lot of places, you get answers (and if there's a bug, fixes) really really fast. Shout out to Marc Hoffman and the other excellent people at RemObjects here. You guys are great.

2. It is essential to modern development to have a second editor, or two or three. The more editors you know, the better, up to the point of diminishing returns, which is about six editors, as far as I can see. I actually regularly use three editors even when working with a powerful IDE like Visual Studio or Delphi. There are things I can do with Notepad++ that I haven't learned to do with anything else. And for searching code, I just love Visual Studio Code, and it has a great Pascal plugin. And there are things I can do with VIM that other editors just can't do. If you haven't messed around with Visual Studio Code yet, please please download it and try it. You'll thank me. And if you're bored some day when you should be coding, try learning VIM. You'll accidentally become more productive, especially when you need to large or very precise edits across a large set of files. Agree with me here? Disagree? Discuss.

3. Question for readers: Have you tried Delphi 10.2 tokyo on Linux yet? I'm planning to try that out soon. Will probably write about what I figure out when I have time to play with it.

6 comments:

Yes, I have tried it on 64-bit RHEL, Ubuntu and CentOS and it runs OK. I would love to migrate our server code to support Windows and Linux cross platform, but the ARC vs non-ARC life time management for Linux vs Windows, is actually a bigger showstopper than adapting to and supporting different subsystems. I really don't know what EMBT is thinking here. I don't want to have to test and adjust for two different memory management models.

I've embraced Atom.io since its begin, and since I've got roughly anything I need there I haven't checked out Visual Studio Code (but I should, I keep reading). But you're right I still need Notepad++ for some minor edits. And Delphi's IDE+editor still rocks. Atom's delphi/pascal is kind-of OK, and kind-of works for the work on http://yoy.be/xxm/ I do with Atom. (Though if a day would get a few hours extra than 24, I should look into writing xxm support myself...) For other specific edits, I've made http://yoy.be/RE.html, http://yoy.be/DirDiff.html and http://yoy.be/DirFind.html

I second your recommendation of VS Code. I use it mostly for editing my Java and PHP source files, however I also find it great for browsing Delphi source, where I just want to "look" at code file-by-file from a directory or directories. Incidentally, if there was a way of doing the latter in Delphi, I'd probably do it there.